Geographic information systems (GIS) technology plays a relatively important role in software applications, as it provides a user an intuitive way to view, understand, and analysis multi-dimension data. However, with the development of software applications that may handle a relatively large amount of data and provide real-time or near real-time analysis, incorporating GIS technology presents its own set of challenges not encountered in conventional software application paradigms. In particular, an extract, transform, load (ETL) process is a relatively complex, time consuming process, as it provides the data for real time processing. The transactional raw data from different systems such as databases, applications or even unstructured data in data editing/spreadsheet programs may be in different data structures and different address formats. Because the whole ETL process is relatively complex and time consuming, providing the user with a real time analysis can be relatively difficult, especially in the case when some of the collected data has to be converted to spatial data (e.g., points, polylines or polygons) in order to carry out geographic processing.
Conventional methods of geographical processing involving complex spatial calculations upon relatively large amounts of data are relatively slow, especially in the case the user wishes to have access to real-time or near-time analysis reports.